Considerable attention in industry has been given to the automatic capping of filled bottles, and, such an operation is to be considered as being notorious in the art.
Further, machines for capping bottles and uncapping them are known, for example, from U.S. Pat. No. 4,178,732, Pfleger, issued Dec. 18, 1979, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,762,029, Chen, issued Aug. 9, 1988. However, in these patents manual intervention on the part of the operator is required in order to cause the machine to operate in a specific direction, either for uncapping a bottle, or, recapping a bottle. Further, the structures disclosed in these patents are not readily adapted to the quick removal of a bottle cap of a single bottle by a laboratory worker who is holding the bottle in one of the workers hands, and then, the reapplication of the bottle caP to the bottle in an entirely automatic manner requiring no manipulation of controls of the device by the worker, subsequent to the worker having performed some operation on the interior of the bottle.